SEEN AND UNSEEN

Since my last entry, the fireworks have more or less died off and I am afforded the opportunity to sleep through the night. However, that does not mean that I was able to at first. It took me several days to get back into the swing of sleeping at night and being (somewhat) fully conscious during the day. That being said, all is much better now and my great irritation at all things permeating my life has begun to lift.

There was a party at West Egg last night (3/10) and I found the universe, once again, reflecting back all that has been going on in my life. During the past week, I’ve been crankier than usual and my normal cheery self has been pulled in, unwilling to say my usual “Hello”s to everyone on the compound. I’ve been having a seven-month itch, if you will. I’ve got my stores, my ex, my job, my social circle, my home, my exercise routine, my indulgences, my language classes hell, I’ve even got my coffee. I’ve settled comfortably into my routine, learned to grasp the basics of surviving comfortably by myself and plateau-ed into that space where things are comfortable enough that my brain is starting to rot inside my head for lack of struggle. Granted, it’s a phase and I’ll get through it but I’ve definitely been overwhelmed at the thought of staying in this (head) space for any period of time.

So, I decided to embrace the opportunities for change that the universe has seen fit to provide. My Brazilian Angel has been harassing me to join the nearby gym for some time and I finally decided to take action on that. We went together on Friday (3/9) and I joined. I took some seriously tiring classes that night and left feeling much better. Then, while my Brazilian Angel was trying to negotiated the best price for me at the gym, my cellphone rang and the American hostess who has the massive home in the South was calling to personally invite me to a party she was throwing on Saturday.

“I’m sorry, I just think of you and [your Brazilian Angel] as the same. You’re just always together. I know it’s wrong and I apologize. I invited her and it was stupid of me not to invite you,” she flooded me with, I found, a misplaced apology. It’s true, within West Egg, my Brazilian Angel and I are rather inseparable; I need a shoulder to lean on as I often feel utterly out of place in the world of business men and their housewives (who are not really interested in the arts or culture but rather creating a flawless and decadent home) and le Francais is more often than not completely disinterested in going so she always needs a date. In that it is a community made up entirely of married/married-like, coupled-up couples, if you invite one person there is a counterpart who is inherently invited with that invitation; I am like that inherent invite for my Brazilian Angel. Considering my anomalous presence, it would be ridiculous to think that on occasion, my “single” status wouldn’t cause this sort of occasional oversight. I suspect, at this point, and considering some of the looks my Brazilian Angel and I get, much of West Egg is under the impression that I’m a third party in their marriage.

“Oh my god, dude, don’t worry. Thank you for the invite. I’d love to come,” I accepted, firmly deciding it was time to establish myself as a singular entity and a distinct person within the Western sphere here in Xi’An.

Saturday morning, my Brazilian Angel and I met up briefly and she told me she wouldn’t be able to make the party and so not only would I be going alone but I’d also be flying totally solo the whole party. Nervous at that made me, I tried to play it cool.

I was then off to meet my Chinese Angel for theraputic massages. As long as I can remember, there’s been something wrong (in the “pinched nerve” genre of injury) with my neck where my shoulder and neck meet on my left side and I had decided to take matters into hands before I get any older and sort things while my body’s still pretty good at healing. I don’t want to have to have back/spinal/nerve surgery of any sort when I get older and considering how much more my neck has been hurting and tingling with all the traveling and stress, it seemed a bit of a “wake up call” moment.

We wandered into the South together because she had called 114 (which is the informational line here in Xi’An; you want anything and they can tell you where to get it) and therefore knew exactly where to go for our issue.

As I was laid out there on the table, my masseur explained that I had injured myself quite seriously but that he could fix me up fairly well in seven sessions. Considering I have been in a fair amount of pain for years, seven sessions of his abuse (and wow, it hurts like nothing I’ve ever experienced) doesn’t seem too daunting. So, I agreed and we sorted a schedule for my rehab. Then he lifted me and twisted my head around, cracking my neck in a multitude of places, releasing a lot of my tension and apparently, resetting some of my vertebrae. Yeah, it freaked me out to be twisted up like some sort of chicken about to be prepared for dinner but my neck feels phenomenally good now. I’m sore as a bastard but can’t remember the last time I felt this range of motion. I also have those circular hickies on my back because he’s been using the suction cup therapy to test my blood circulation. Apparently, if the skin under the suction cup turns red, you’ve got good circulation. If the skin turns purple, your circulation is not so good. The circulation on my upper left side is, as you may have guessed, not so good. You can even see, though the pressure on all the suction cups was the same and placed in mirror image locations on my back, the ones around my injury are a deeper shade of purple than the ones far away from the injury.

Hicky-fied, my Chinese Angel and I parted ways and I headed off to the party. Upon entering the party, I made friends with a new New Yorker. I recognized her right off the bat as having the same shade of dark red hair I had when I got to Xi’An, my naughty-library spectacles and a fabulous New York intellectual blasé air about her. It was love at first sight.

I hurried over to her and we immediately hit it off. We were talking about learning Chinese and teaching English (many of the housewives here teach a couple of hours of English a week to keep busy and out of the house) and I mentioned, “Sha yi si.” (It sounds like “Sha ee za” or when said emphatically, it sounds like the German stigma-equivalent of our “fuck” though it means “shit” literally.)

“I haven’t heard that one. What does it mean?”

“It’s the local dialect for ‘What’s the meaning’ or ‘What is that’ but it sounds just like that very naught German word,” I explained, not wanting to holler German curses in front of a room half filled with native German speakers.

“Oh, I don’t speak German. It just sounds like ‘shiksa’ to me. That’s a very naughty Jewish word. My ex husband was Jewish,” said my fellow shiksa.

“Yeah, I know shiksa. One half of my family is named ‘Yardeni’ and the other is, well, not,” I said, not explaining that my Jewish family is probably the most tolerant and least likely to use language like that out of all the factions comprising my notion of family despite their history of Shoah survival and the blonde/blue-eyed nature of the rest of my family. In fact, I wear the ‘shiksa’ badge with honor though they wish I “wouldn’t use such language.” I figured, considering her flinching at the mention of the word shiksa and the immediate mentioning of an ex, that she bumped into a matriarch who was not about to mix blood lines and discussing how lucky my family has been to have had the open and accepting matriarch that was my grandmother was certainly about to win me no fans.

My new favorite lady friend and I made it to the dinner table only for me to discover that the one man I would have considered having had an affair with was, in fact, married and to my fellow shiksa. “Well done on that,” I thought.

Everyone eventually sat down and we all started to eat. As we joked about sex and life and work and culture clashes, I found myself remarkably comfortable within the casual sphere. It will always be clear to me that I am not a part of that world but I’m not usually a part of any group I’m supposed to fit into and the women who (to me) really seem to make or break social circles did everything in their power to accept me despite the fact that I am single and the only men at the tables were their husbands. Usually, married women look upon single women as a parasite looking to pick off a husband grown too comfortable in his matrimony. Unlike most parties comprised of married couples, the wives seemed to have no problem with my presence.

During dinner, I got to hear first hand accounts summing up global impact of the Shanghai stock market crash, the devastation of Africa by AIDS and poverty, the healthcare in India and the best places to buy chorizo in Spain. A girl could get used to a life filled with such stories.

After dinner, we blew out several dozen eggs to make Easter eggs. As we hung out, being silly and making terrifically bad jokes about who could “blow” the best, I started to notice one of the men at the table, whose wife is back in their home country, was clearly focusing on getting my attention. I would be lying to say I didn’t enjoy the attention and one of my more gray areas is flirting. I know that emotional infidelity is a HUGE no-no and I have no interest in promoting it but I also feel that flirting (be it with man, woman, dog, tree, whatever) is a healthy, natural part of being alive. The easy “right” answer would have been to stay at my end of the table and not get up to make friends.

And, I tried that answer for a while. As we painted eggs, I talked politics, art and life with my beloved Bloke (the Englishman who wrote me the somewhat strongly worded email and then recanted moments later) and his fantastic, Grande Dame of a wife. He seemed quite interested in my perspective on a multitude of political issues to the exclusion of the other Americans at the tables. It no longer seems at though he’s patronizing me but actually interested in my conversation. I quite enjoy our discussions as he’s well versed in all the things that interest me and often teaches me about the historical context of my passions.

Eventually however, my friend at the other end of the table won my interest back and after dessert, I scooted down to his end of the table under the pretext of talking to a friend of mine seated beside my new interest. We got to talking and as coffee was being served, the hostess and I reminisced about college drinking games like Quarters (you bounce a quarter on the table to get it into a cup; if it lands in the cup you don’t do a shot, if you miss the shot, you do a shot). She then decided that we all needed to play Quarters.

We inverted the rules of Quarters to make it so that if you actually made the shot that you’d need to do a shot. Someone else then added the rule that if you made the shot, you chose a drinking buddy who had to drink with you. Someone else then added the rule that if the quarter went under the table while you were trying to make the shot, you had to drink with a buddy.

So we played Quarters for a little while and then decided to switch up to a leg slapping game. Essentially, everyone sits in a circle, places one hand on the thigh of the person to their left and one hand on the thigh of the person to their right. Then, going clockwise, each hand must slap the thigh it is on in the order of hands laid on thighs; a “wave” of slaps, if you will. Considering the twisting and intertwining of arms, it’s damned hard. And, if someone hits a thigh twice, the slapping shifts directions. If you fuck up, you take a shot which, of course, really helps with the whole not-fucking-up-again thing.

Before we explained the game the hostess and I told everyone to sit boy-girl-boy-girl as we figured some of the more conservative men at the table would be uncomfortable with touching other men like that. Granted, most of the men were perfectly comfortable with the notion but we decided it would be good to nip the issue in the bud in lieu of turning the dinner party into a political stand.

My (male) friend and I switched seats so I was between he and my new interest. Everyone, of course, made the requisite inappropriate jokes about touching each other and we were off.

Of course, I would be the first person down. And then the second as well. The Bloke started teasing me about not sending the chain towards me. Several of the men on the other side of the table (with the Bloke) started heckling me about taking all the fun. Mercifully, someone else screwed up and as we played a few more rounds, everyone got fully toasted either as the drinker or the partner of the drinker (we kept the ‘If you drink, you’re not drinking alone’ rule).

Then we took a “water break,” either to make it or to drink it.

“I’m so sorry, what’s your name again?” My interest/friend asked me.

“No worries, it’s Christina.” I didn’t ask him for his name as I knew it from the hostess having mentioned it to me. Also, as a verbose man, I wasn’t sure my friend wasn’t just looking for a sounding board as so many married men are. My “sussing out” period tends to be one where I give very little back verbally and so many married men take my silence to mean I’m just a receptacle for all the things their wife doesn’t want to hear about. Married men seem to be the demographic most starved for someone just to listen. The idea that I’m pulling in information is often lost on most married blather-ers; frankly, they’re not interested in me as a person just me as a dumpster. So, I waited to see if it mattered whether or not I was retaining information such as what his name was or if my presence was merely about his own release. Most of the time when a married man talks that much to me, it’s about his own release and I am irrelevant but every once and a while, he’s just a talkative dude who is interested in my friendship.

He glanced at me, pausing, waiting for something. Clearly he had been expecting the same question back; a point in the direction of “talkative dude interested in a friend” and not “talkative dude interested in a dumpster.” “Do you know my name?”

I simply said his name and his eyes lowered, clearly a bit embarrassed at not having retained my name. “Don’t worry about it. I can never remember names. The only reason I remembered yours was because [our hostess] just said it.” I tried to explain my complete not-taking-of-offence position. “Besides, we were never formally introduced.”

He looked me straight in the eye and spoke so close to the end of my sentence he nearly cut me off, “Yes we were.”

I smiled. “I’m not that drunk. No we weren’t.”

“The Sheraton. Christmas.”

I retreated into my head to review all the people I had met at the Sheraton that night and I would have sworn on my mother’s life that we had not met. Fortunately, for the Jude, no one took that bet. He was sure we had met and it was the second time in as many days that someone had seen me in a fully present way they marked their memory that simply made not a single wave in mine.

On Friday, I was told by a coworker that one of her friends who I met briefly saw me with a “Foreign Man” and she wanted to know if he was my boyfriend. I saw neither the friend nor could I remember being with a foreign man. I eventually figured out that they had mistaken my shorthaired Chinese Angel with her fluent English for a foreign man but it is strange to me the way many people seem to have taken greater notice of me than I would have ever thought. Even my beloved colleague has been attempting to find me a boyfriend, despite my complete ignorance as to why he’s been introducing me to various single Chinese men and asking if I could find a suitable girl for them. (My Chinese Angel eventually had to clue me in to the fact that he’s taken it upon himself to find me a man.)

Nevertheless, there I sat, looking dumbfounded at this man I swear I had never seen or met before in my life and for the second time in as many days, I was forced to brush off the urge to dismiss it as a case of mistaken identity (as is easy to do in the States but not so easy to do in Xi’An where not a lot of people look like me) and instead had to seriously consider the idea that I was living a life I was not aware of. Frankly, I don’t like the idea of being seen. I like the idea of seeing but not of being seen. It really, really unnerves me that other people remember things about me as an adult that I don’t remember about myself. It’s not the lack of control; it’s my own lack of awareness that bothers the ever-loving hell out of me.

“Yeah, the Christmas party. It’s a shame you guys couldn’t stay,” someone said to my friend.

And then the dominos fell into place. The one foreign housewife I remember ducking out of the Christmas party early had her husband meet up with her for the carols before the dinner. They had a plane to catch or he had just gotten back from a trip or something but their brief, pre-dinner visit stuck with me because I found it strange to make such a visit to a hotel if there was such a pressing travel thing happening at the same time. Granted, at that point, I was still seriously irritated from the drunken jackass who felt the need to insult me and my profession in front of all our mutual acquaintances so my recollection of meeting my friend is spotty, at best.

I remember the firm handshake because it was respectful in an egalitarian sort of way. I remember seeing what an odd pairing this fit, athletic, strong spirited husband-figure seemed to be to the neurotic, melancholy, sedentary housewife I had met previously. His spirit seemed so youthful and hers seemed so broken. I remember thinking what a trap many of the marriages of West Egg seem to be; they can’t leave each other because they’ve spent their whole adult lives shuttling from one country to the next with nary an extramarital anything that isn’t utterly ephemeral and nothing in their home country resembling a support system that recognizes who they are and what their life is like. I remember thinking how much I don’t envy the lifestyle of most of the West Egg community. Granted, there are, as always, those couples that just seem to have it together and really love being with each other (the Bloke and the Grande Dame for one) but by and large most seem to be together simply because they are. I remember all of those things and I remember his heavy gold bracelet and heavy gold necklace, both discretely tucked beneath his shirt, because heavy gold anything always seems tacky to me and it was the only thing I could discern that seemed to coordinate to anything on her. (Her jewelry is all of the very large, very bejeweled, very expensive and very gold variety. She would make a rapper proud.) What I don’t remember is looking him in the eye (which is what I remember about the way people look; actually, I remember the way they look back at me) and so nothing about his face rang a bell.

“Oh yeah, I remember. You left during the carols because you had some travel thing, right?”

He nodded and smiled and the group returned to playing the slapping game.

At the next break, he was sure to get me a fair amount of water, feed me some food and then he started venturing into asking me about myself.

“Do you like teaching?”

“Yeah. For now. Next year or so.”

“What do you want to do after that?”

I shrugged.

“Do you have any idea?”

“I’ve been in disaster services, film production, food services, marketing, banking, education and none of them...” I trailed off and waived my hand in the air to brush them aside.

“Is there one that maybe you could see yourself going back to?”

And the honest answer for today is, “No.”

“Do you have a plan about where you see yourself in a few years?”

And again, the honest answer is, “No.” In a room full of people married to their jobs and the lifestyle their job provides, in a room full of people so well planned out and so well cared for, I was surprised how little fear I had in stating the truth. I was in a room surrounded by adults drowning in money, even-keeled plans and all the things you’re “supposed” to be doing and I felt utterly unashamed by my “fuck it, this is who I am” attitude. I’ve lost my taste for trying to hide the facts of who I am. Besides, in giving up the reigns, I’ve had a much more interesting ride. And, there is the little fact that everywhere I get, I get on my own dime through my own hard work and ingenuity. I am indebted to no one and I live free of the politics of the love/money struggle so many marriages seem to be strangled by.

My friend held my gaze and seemed thoroughly entertained by the idea that I am unabashedly not grown up. “So you’ll just move about until you find the job you love?”

“I guess. I like being a transient.”

“You don’t know the right job now, but you’ll know it when you see it, right?”

“Don’t know. I may have had the right job. It may have jumped up and bit me in the ass and I didn’t notice.” After all, I am, above all, a jackass. I don’t doubt the possibility that I might look back one day and say, “Shit, what the fuck was I thinking giving up job X?!” All I can manage is the best I can manage in each moment. I’ve made some serious mistakes and there’s very little I can do about that. I don’t doubt that the older I get, the more those mistakes will be revealed to me. I only hope that I will take some pity on my youthful stupidity and remember I did the best I could with what I had. Ultimately, you simply didn’t know then what you know now.

We talked a fair bunch more, played a few more drinking games and then it was time for me to head home. I was poured into a cab and was fast asleep before midnight.